Sunday 7 November 2010 06.52 EST
First published on Sunday 7 November 2010 06.52 EST

Guiding a 750-horsepower projectile around a grand prix circuit at 200mph is one thing. Being confronted on your way home from work by half a dozen men with automatic weapons and bad intentions is another. Formula One drivers tend not to frighten easily, but Jenson Button's experience while trying to leave the Interlagos circuit on Saturday night, after qualifying for today's penultimate round of the 2010 world championship series, was great deal scarier than heading into the circuit's first turn in the middle of a howling pack of racing cars.

The attempted hold-up, or kidnapping, or whatever it may have been, took place at dusk, a few hundred metres from the circuit's main entrance, on a busy road where several such incidents have occurred since the Brazilian grand prix returned to São Paulo in 1990. The world champion and his companions were in an unmarked and relatively inconspicuous car, leading to suspicions that the armed men may have been tipped off by a colleague inside the circuit.

Interlagos is a suburb of São Paulo, built amid the endless sprawl on rolling hills above the stinking Pinheiros river. It is a mixture of favelas – shanty towns – and apartment blocks. The Avenida Interlagos, which leads from the main entrance down the hill to the cast-iron bridge over the river and thence towards the city centre, is bordered on one side by a variety of small businesses and on the other by a tumbling jungle of three-storey concrete apartment buildings painted buff with rust-coloured doors and shutters. Built into the side of a hill, they are joined by elevated walkways and identified only by numbers: Bloc 6, Bloc 7, and so on. Stray dogs lie in the entrances to the narrow alleyways and most of the available surfaces are covered with graffiti in the distinctive Gothic style favoured by São Paulo's wielders of aerosol cans. It was from there that the raiders appeared to come.

This is the city's wild south-west. During the four days of the race meeting, pairs of armed policemen are stationed every 50 metres. But half a dozen years ago a group of Toyota mechanics were ambushed at gunpoint early one morning while traffic heading towards the Autodrómo Carlos Pace was at a standstill.

Four miles away lies Morumbi, another suburb and a different world, where plush apartment blocks decorate the skyline, rising out of verdant avenues encircling the local Jockey Club. Most of the drivers stay at the four-star Morumbi Hilton, which is where Button was heading through thick traffic at 7pm when the armed men stepped out of the dusk, some of them apparently carrying automatic weapons.

Button, his father John, manager Richard Goddard, and personal trainer Mike Collier, were being driven in an armoured B-class Mercedes-Benz by a police-trained chauffeur. As usual, the city-bound side of the dual carriageway was at a standstill. The driver's only option, it seems, was to force his way between the stationary cars, knocking several aside as he attempted to put distance between himself and the threat.

"We stopped at the traffic lights, three rows back," Button recalled after arriving at the circuit today. "Our driver, as always, stopped early, leaving space to the car in front. We looked to the right and saw a few guys gathering by the side of the road, just by the entrance to a building. They looked a bit suspect but we didn't think anything of it. Then Richard noticed that one of the guys had a baton hanging down from his arm and I noticed that one was playing with something in his trousers, and it was a gun.

"As soon as I said that, the driver looked across. They saw him look and they started running towards the car. He angled the car and floored it – it didn't look like there was enough space to get through. He went between six cars and rammed every single car just to get past. We got through in the end, but looking behind there were two guys with handguns – quite a simple looking handgun – and one guy with a machine gun.

"We were in a B-class Merc, which is not the biggest of cars, but it's bulletproof, so it's pretty heavy and it's good at getting through traffic like that. It stood up. I had this [McLaren team top] on but the windows are blacked out so you couldn't see anything.

"We stopped right outside the entrance so I think we were more unlucky than anything else. You hear about it happening over the years but you don't know how it feels until it happens to you. It's a pretty scary situation. You don't believe it's happening. It's quite strange. And I don't think we were the only people that had it yesterday. Apparently, from what I hear, the Sauber mechanics were held up and actually had to stop and give them everything. They had a pretty horrible ordeal and I feel sorry for those guys.

"It's a horrible thing to happen. I feel fine now. There's a lot of attention because it's the first time it's been a driver that's been held up. Hopefully it will show the dangers that are down there and we'll take more care. From what I hear, most of the drivers have got police escorts into the circuits as well as a bullet-proof car and a policeman as a driver. It's not a very comfortable feeling."

It is 52 years since a reigning world champion was the object of a successful kidnap attempt. In February 1958, while visiting Cuba to take part in a sports car race, Juan Manuel Fangio was snatched from the lobby of Havana's Lincoln Hotel at gunpoint and held for 24 hours by two men who turned out to be members of Fidel Castro's revolutionary 26th of July Movement. Intending only to draw the world's attention to their struggle against President Fulgencio Batista, which was then less than a year away from success, the kidnappers treated their victim courteously and released him after the race. A film of the incident, titled Operación Fangio, was made in 1999.

Today, Bernie Ecclestone insisted the race was safe despite security fears. "I have been coming here for over 40 years. I have walked around, driven, been out in and restaurants in the city and never seen or heard anything threatening.

"I think they look for victims who are not too bright. All the people who have been robbed seem to be people outside the top ten of the grid. Maybe that's what they target, I don't know."